Matt Funk huh?

Old Matt must have had to overcome a certain amount of unconscious prejudice to become the engineer in charge. Sort of makes you want to put on your flame proof suit just reading about it.

The important part

has at least been got right, in that you don't have a video replay on the big screen, just a signal to the ref. In the other sports, the controversies have just become about smaller distances, they haven't gone away entirely.

Suggested viewing

'The Shark Callers of Kontu', suggested reading 'The Iliad' by Homer.

Meanwhile

What are all these 'cubic meters' measuring?

Commitment now conditional

The Government has now made a budget surplus (people in the Northern Hemisphere may remember them) an aim rather than a commitment. This is sensible economically but may remain damaging politically.

Other factors

It's not just that modern machines are powerful enough. I didn't realise just how noisy my old computer was until I upgraded about two years ago. I asked the local computer bloke to build me a machine that was adequate but quiet. What I got was a machine that was adequate, can play many games, and is totally silent in operation. In a domestic environment that matters.

The other aspect is that more computer power tended to demand more electric power (and generate more heat). It was important to me to break that cycle.

Hunting not fighting

Not directly addressed in the article, but I thought the advantage these weapons gave you was in hunting big and fast game. This allowed modern humans to hunt more species over a wider range. As other have pointed out, weapons you chuck away have a use in fighting but one rather significant drawback; once you've chucked it, it's gone, and the other bloke now has it and can chuck it back (OK they might not have the woomeras, as we call them around here, but would that really make that big a difference?). So I believe the theory is that we out-competed the Neaderthals, rather than just topping or enslaving them.

aaargh!!

I had the misfortune to have to use it just this morning to load a couple of movies on to my patner's iPad. This should be breathtakingly simple, no? It's a media device after all. Well, what can you say, what a piece of crap.

They should use 44 gallon drums

They'd be lighter!

Great game

What really got me into it though, was that they gave away a complete level which was not part of the game as a teaser; you got in on the free CDs stuck on the front of computer mags. After finishing that you really wanted to play the whole game, and the intro sequence was just a classic. I'm also surprised they haven't made a movie of it.

Australia is neither England nor America

and I do hear young people here saying 'math' rather than 'maths'. They also say 'elevator' instead of 'lift' and many other things. So you're all wrong, or right, or something.

As for ball lightning, I've never seen it, but it might explain the Min Min Lights.

Don't convert

As an Australian I have to agree that the way the conversion was done here was the best approach. A gradual approach won't work, and suggesting you maintain two or more systems and expect people to convert between them is the worst idea of all. It's true that many imperial measures still remain; they still talk about acres in real estate and for some reason computer screens are in inches but TVs often (but not always) in cm, but really, you won't take long to get used to your weight in kg, your height in cm, road speeds in km/h and the temperature in celsius so long as that is all you hear.

Only one competitor?

I suppose it makes for an easy review when you only compare the product to one other, but really, there's quite a lot of other e-book readers (Sony, Kobo etc.) and the review would be more uuseful if it provided more comparisons.

Different lesson I think

I think the real lesson is that (some of) the brand-name manufacturers tend to make better kit. That's certainly true with with my Transformer Pad. Around these parts Asus isn't really a bigger brand than Acer but at the moment Acer don't really have anything that competes with Asus's offerings, even though both are using Android.

Another interesting thing, at least to me, was when I went to buy it the staff in the shop all knew what it was, why you would want to buy it and in fact the salesbloke explained how he used his to take his uni notes (he could have been blagging, of course). I got the impression they were moving a few. No one tried to sell me an iPad.

Content is king

Agreed, I download iView content to my PC and stream it to my TV, also the SBS catch-up service. Unfortunately Foxtel is wedded to the broadcast model and until they allow me choose to watch what I want, when I want, no Foxtel for me regardless of how it is delivered.

Wow

. "But that has to be okay. It has to be, you have to think that way. The competition ... is not with other device manufacturers, it's with Google." Which is true if you don't actually make and sell phones. But if you do, well, 'wow' is all I can say.

Ozymandias

Yep, not surprising everyone thinks of him. On the other hand, the pyramids are still there, and they meet my definition of 'massive', which a 4m statue doesn't I'm afraid.

I made the mistake

of linking a bank account to a Paypal account. This apparently gives Paypal the right to take money out of your bank account in the case of a dispute without bothering to notify you first. Goodbye Ebay, goodbye Paypal. I'd rather give my stuff away.

I bought a Transformer Pad at the weekend

Having realised now just how clunky it was to plink around on my low-res netbook compared to the touchscreen-with-keyboard-when-you-need-it experience, I can see why ultrabooks are doomed; they need all that grunt just to run Windows, and on portable devices Windows is definitely a problem. I can also see why Microsoft is developing Windows 8; they're toast if they don't.

Yeah well

Here in often-warm Australia I find that turning off surplus-at-the-moment electrical gear makes the house noticably cooler in summer. In winter it acts as additional heating, of course, but the winter is much shorter.

In the mean time all my computer kit goes to two power points on the wall which I switch off when not using the computer. Pretty simple to do, saves electricity and me money. Works for me. I've never seen any 'green' advice about home energy saving that didn't say the number one way to save energy was to take shorter showers. The advice always is that behaviour change is necessary, and that behaviour change can be hard to achieve. So that's a straw man to me. But I have to save special derision for those saying plastic carrier bags aren't a problem. They are a pain in the arse and pollute plenty of otherwise beautiful places all over the world.

Ouch

I understand that the first definite indication that different areas of the brain controlled different functions resulted from an even more traumatic injury to a US railway builder in the 19th Century. He was tamping down some dynamite with a three foot crowbar when 'BOOM'. Crowbar went clean through his skull and travelled a considerable distance down-range. He survived but had distinct personality changes (not just a fear of dynamite and crowbars).

I own an N900

It was a nice device in many ways but unfinished and had a catastrophic habit of doing some kind of background clean up process that slowed it to a crawl, always at the most inconvenient times. Nevertheless with appropriate development I can see it would have led to an excellent device. I'm now on Android. Going Android would have been a challenge for Nokia, but Samsung has managed pretty well and the alternative choice doesn't seem to be working out too well.

Well on the tin it says:

(Well, on the project home page anyway):

"The Apache™ Hadoop™ project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-avaiability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-availabile (sic) service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

The project includes these subprojects: la la la"

So don't ask me, What businesses of many kinds need is to provide the people making the decisions with accurate information about what is happening in the business now, as well as what is happening in the market the business is in. If this Hadoop thingy can help do this, then it should be useful. If it just provides another layer of obfuscation, then not so much.

Typical

All oppositions have an absolute commitment to open government. Then they win the election and ...

Some of the stuff that was coming out under the previous mob was very interesting, but since the current government won't even tell us where the 1.5 Billion in cuts in the current budget are coming from, it's unlikely that their commitment to open government is anything more than bilgewater.

Oh dear

It seems there are two distinct types of Opera users. First are the desktop users who have used it for years, keep trying the other browsers and keep coming back to Opera. Second are the mobile users, many of whom have Facebook accounts and don't think, let alone care, about privacy. The second group would be the vast majority I imagine, but I'm in the first group and it's bye bye Opera for me if this happens. I doubt Facebook would care if they lost every single desktop user; we're not the people they're after.

Yep

You can still get schooners and middies, they just put the metric measurement on the side; huge sacrifice lads. Not many drank pints in those days, but you get them in 'Irish' pubs now. The reason to change the road signs and speedos is to get people used to the measurements. It's really a lot simpler, believe me.

Dear Sir Steven

There is no technical limitation in either the car or the road that prevents you driving your car in England at 100 miles per hour. The limitation you face is legal, not technical, so unfortunately your car analogy fails.